Contents

Plot

Triffids are strange fictional plants, capable of
rudimentary animal-like behaviour: they are able to uproot
themselves and walk, possess a deadly whip-like poisonous sting, and may even have the ability to
communicate with each other. On screen they vaguely resemble
gigantic asparagus
shoots.

Bill Masen begins the story in hospital, with his eyes bandaged.
He discovers that while he has been blindfolded, an unusual meteor shower has
blinded most people on Earth. Masen finds people in London struggling to stay alive
in the face of their new, instantly-acquired affliction, some
cooperating, some fighting: after just a few days society is
collapsing.

Relationship to novel

The film retained some basic plot elements from Wyndham's novel,
but it was not a particularly faithful adaptation. "It strays
significantly and unnecessarily from the book and is less well
regarded than the BBC's intelligent (if dated) 1981 TV serial."[2] Unlike
the novel, the Triffids
arrive as spores in an earlier meteor shower, and some of the
action is moved to Spain. Most
seriously, it supplies a simplistic solution to the Triffid problem: salt water
dissolves them, and "the world was saved". This different ending
appears to be closer to the ending of The War
of the Worlds than Wyndham's novel, as the invading aliens
succumb to a common product of Earth (as the Martians died of bacteria) and both end with a
religious tone (quite unlike Wyndham). This ending was also used to
similar effect in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs.

Reception

Simon Clark,
author of The Night of the
Triffids stated on interview: "The film version is
enjoyable, luring the effective looking Triffids away with music
from an ice-cream van and some other good action scenes. The
Triffids' death-by-seawater climax is weak and contrived though.
But it would still rank in my all-time top 100 films."[3]

References in popular
culture

It is this version of the film to which the song "Science
Fiction Double Feature", from The
Rocky Horror Show, refers, in the line: "And I really got
hot when I saw Janette Scott fight a triffid that spits
poison and kills..." A Triffid appears as one of the aliens in Area
52 in Looney Tunes: Back in Action. A Triffid also appears
aboard the spacecraft as one of the plants harvested by the aliens
in E.T.. [4]